Picture City

This is the world of images, and also the world of mirages: passing across the stage of a small theatre, Rayman can find on his path beings straight from a pirate or a science fiction film. In particular, he meets Mama, an impressive shrew armed with a bizarre rolling pin...

Picture City (French: La Cité des Images – The City of Images) is the fourth world in the original Rayman game. It consists of a land mainly made up of drawing materials, but Rayman will still find himself twice on the stage of a theatre. As he makes progress among erasers, tables, pencils, yin-yangs, writing chalks and pens, he has to jump onto pencil sharpeners, dodging the drawing pins that stand in his way. Danger is omnipresent, as shown by the ink-covered erasers placed above the void, on which slipping down is irremediably followed by a deadly fall. Rayman must also pass over an ink sea as soon as he arrives, and he will find ink pots and paint buckets as he moves forward. In the Rayman Junior games, boxes full of ink, gouache tubes and palettes are part of this scenery. Rayman will also find his Super helicopter power, which will help him to pass through this strange world.

2D Nightmare is the twelfth and final minigame in Rayman 3. It is exclusive to the Nintendo GameCube version and is meant to be unlocked upon connecting the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance version of the game with all levels complete via a link cable. Due to a bug the game never registers the final level, Heart of the Ancients, as complete thus rendering it impossible to unlock the minigame without cheats on either the GameCube or Game Boy Advance versions.

At one point, the developers at Phoenix Studio were considering the option of having Rayman return to Picture City, along with other locations from the original game, during his fourth outing. Some concept artwork was produced, depicting Picture City as it would appear in a 3D game. However, Rayman 4 was ultimately cancelled.

Picture City in 3D, as visualised by Rayman 4 concept artist Guillaume Bonamy.

More concept art, of what appears to be a cave in Picture City, with pencils for stalacmites and stalactites.